About 3 or 4 months back I started using linux. I started a little project of making well formated notes whenever I found out how to do something new. So next time it came to reinstall I'd be able to have everything up and running in no time at all. It got a little out of hand thoguh and I thought I'd try and write it so it may help other people too. At almost 10,000 words I thought I should post it and get some feedback.

The html version is currently lacks some of the formatting as it's directly saved from OpenOffice so I've posted the sxw version too. It's certianly far from finished and some of the information needs reviewing and updating too.

UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems such as GNU/Linux's directory layout can be VERY confusing to a windows user. For starters there's no drive letters; everything starts at /, which actually is very usefull because you can replace the directories below with different partitions. Also, instead of "\", "/" is used, which actually makes a lot of sense since it's much easier to reach when typing.

Below I'll list some of the folders and what the, to my knowledge are for. One or two of these may just be educated guesses. Remember not all of these are actually files on the hard drive. Some refer to various system devices. And different folders may actually be located in different partitions or even a different hard drive. If something isn't listed your system may be different or I may just have no clue what it's for.

/bin

Binary. This contains all the most basic programs that are required for using the system. Such as cd, mv, mkdir, mount, kill and other basic programs.

Device. This is a fun one. All devices on your computer will be here. such as your hard drives. ie, /dev/hda is the first IDE drive and /dev/hdb is the second as well as many other things. You can't access the devices directly from this directory. You need to initialize or mount them some other way and they will be available else where.

/etc

Configuration. Any major system configuration files will usually be found here. Of course you need root access to edit any of them.

/home

Home. Now this is where all your user files will be stored. This is often stored on a separate partition or drive to the rest of the system folders. Having a seperate /home partition can save a lot of redoing configuration you've already done on another distro when installing a new distro.

/lib

Libraries. Like window's DLL files. They're compiled code used by other programs. Usually a single library will be used by many different programs for different common tasks. This stops everyone from having to reinvent the wheel all the time, not to mention the axle, the motor and many other parts.

/mnt

When you mount other hard drives and partitions you'll usually make a folder here to mount them too. Though you can mount partitions to folders else where. for example, I like to mount my second drive to a folder called data in my user directory.

/media

Some distros, such as Debian and Fedora Core use this instead of /mnt.

/proc

This directory is an interesting directory because really doesn't exist. It's something created by Linux. Inside /proc are things about what is running right now.

/root

Unlike normal user's root's user files and configuration files are located here. (the configuration files start with a . and are hidden by default)

/sbin

System administration binaries.

/sys

System. Hard to say but I suspect it's various information about the system and system devices status. Probably intended to be interpreted by a program and not read by the user directly.

/tmp

Temporary files. This is where programs dump temporary random crap.

/usr

Non-system-essential binaries, but things you'll want if you want to actually do something with your system.

/usr/local

This is where you should install new programs that didn't come with your distro.

/var

Hard to say. I suspect it's just shared configuration files for general programs. (where as /etc/ is for system configuration).

"Hidden files" are just files that start with a period ("."). Typically these are configuration files and folders. KDE applications will have their config files in ~/.kde/share/apps/APPLICATION and ~/.kde/share/config/APPLICATIONrc. Most other programs will store their configuration in ~/.APPLICATION.

2.1.6 - Symbolic Links (also called symlinks for short)

Symbolic links can be really handy. They just point to another file or directory. To create a symlink, enter
ln -s TARGET LINK_NAME

5. Make it a light text on dark background. It's easier on the eyes. Staring at a white background is like staring at a lightbulb.

6. Somewhere, add
$PATH
Everything that isn't an address of a file or directory typed into a command prompt or something built into the command interpreter is looked for in the directories in $PATH. If it's found, it will be executed. If not, you'll get an error saying command not found.

7. Somewhere add
~/.bashrc
This is a script for the shell bash (which is what most UNIX, GNU, and GNU/Linux distributions use as a shell (command interpreter)) that is excecuted every time you enter bash. This is usefull if for example you want an enviornment variable, such as $PATH always set to something, you could add "PATH=$PATH:/home/user/scripts" so /home/user/scripts is always in $PATH.

07-28-2005

ordoni

you are the same guy in linuxquestions.org............i read this topic there